NAZ IN CONTEXT

The “cradle to prison pipeline” is the Children Defense Fund’s term for the entrapment of tens of thousands of youth, predominately male minorities, in a trajectory that leads to marginalized lives, imprisonment and premature death.

According to the CDF’s 2007 report, “The Cradle to Prison Pipeline can be reduced to one fact: the USA is not a level playing field for all children and does not value all children’s lives equally. So many poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes already against them: born at low birth weight, without pre-natal care, to a teenaged, poorly educated mother and an absent father. At crucial points in their development, from birth through adulthood, more risks and disadvantages accumulate and converge that make a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely.”

These disadvantages include inadequate access to physical and mental health care; lack of early childhood education; exposure to drugs and violence; few positive alternatives to the streets after school and during the summer; and too few positive role models, all of which are seen in North Minneapolis and the Zone (for statistics specific to the Zone, see these pages).

Because poverty, a driving factor behind the cradle to prison pipeline, is too-frequently intertwined with race, it has a disparate impact on the lives of children nationally:

• African American children are more than three times as likely as white children to be born into poverty and to be poor, and are more than four times as likely to live in extreme poverty.
• African American babies are almost twice as likely to be born to teen parents and grow up in single-parent homes. Single-mother households are almost six times as likely to be poor as two-parent households.
• African American children are 70% more likely to not have health insured than white children, and 3 of 4 uninsured African American babies have at least one working parent.
• African American children are 50% more likely to drop out of school, and when they do graduate, they have a greater chance of being unemployed and a lower chance of going directly to full-time college than white high school graduates.
• 42% of children born into poverty remain poor, while 42% barely make it out. Of these, African American children are much less likely than white children to advance beyond the income level of their parents (Why Race and Place Matter, PolicyLink, 2011).

As a result, the cradle to prison pipeline entraps a disproportionate number of minority youth nationwide:

• Although they represent 39% of the American juvenile population, minority youth represent 60% of incarcerated juveniles.
• African American juveniles are about four times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated overall, and about five times as likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses.
• 1 in 3 African American males aged 20-19 was under correctional supervision or control in 2007.
• In 2007, 580,000 African American males were serving sentences in state or federal prison, while fewer than 40,000 African American males earn a bachelor’s degree.
• The suspension rate among African American public school students is three times that for white students.

The cradle to prison crisis is visible on a national, state, and local level. If we don’t take preventive action now, by 2030, Minnesota will need to build a new prison for 1,000 inmates every two years and the number of African Americans arrested will nearly double. Nowhere in Minnesota does this pipeline run wider than in North Minneapolis. We need to work together to dismantle the pipeline—for the sake of our youth and families in the Northside of Minneapolis, the state and the nation.

This is why the work of NAZ, focused on education as a path to community development, overlaps with the recommended action steps of the Children’s Defense Fund. Two of their action steps reference paradigm shifts: the second is to move away from punishment and toward prevention, early intervention, and sustained child investment, while the sixth refers to the development of an “ethic of achievement and high expectations” across the community. Other action steps mirror the whole family wraparound services that NAZ offers: increased access to comprehensive health care beginning prenatally, quality early childhood education opportunities and connections to permanent, caring adults and mentors.

Source (unless otherwise noted): Children’s Defense Fund, “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline.” 2007.

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